Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

From: Ken <kenfar42_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 5 May 2004 12:15:49 -0700
Message-ID: <ea65eb54.0405051115.61e13984@posting.google.com>

"Sarah Tanembaum" <sarah.tanembaum_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<c78jfi$vomj$1_at_ID-205437.news.uni-berlin.de>...
> Beside its an opensource and supported by community, what's the fundamental
> differences between PostgreSQL and those high-price commercial database (and
> some are bloated such as Oracle) from software giant such as Microsoft SQL
> Server, Oracle, and Sybase?
>
> Is PostgreSQL reliable enough to be used for high-end commercial
> application? Thanks

Depends.

How much is your data worth?
How much will downtime cost?
How much will a commercial database cost?

PostgreSQL is a really nice little database, and has a lot going for it:
- easy to install, admin, and use
- easy to port databases between PostgreSQL and other commercial databases
- very high-quality implementation

However, on the other side of the coin:
- missing many of the high-end features needed in large data volumes like partitioning, clustering, parallelism, materialized views, query rewrite, etc.
- missing many of the high-availabity features - missing lots of the various stuff: replication, etc

Personally, when I've got a lot of value in my database I typically opt for a commercial offering. But there are those exceptional situations - like:

- no budget
- just want to prototype
- it's read-only data and you can create a dozen small databases
- the data isn't super-valuable

Then in these cases - PostgreSQL is a nice little product, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it. Much better, btw than its primary competitor - MySQL with its limited, non-ansi sql, and amazing exception handling irregularities.

kenfar Received on Wed May 05 2004 - 14:15:49 CDT